Tag Archives: technology

If you arrived here from the link in Charley Locke’s December 6th Wired article, I encourage you to begin with Part II instead. Really. Stop. Koons will be much more gratified if you read about the book in Part II (and links therein) than about boring Twitter analytics, which is what you will get if you continue below. Really. Go to Part II.

When I wrote my first three posts on bitly (as “bit.ly”) nearly five years ago, they offered a serious-yet-humorous attempt to answer a simple question: Given that bitly’s shortened URLs were only 6-character strings and given the effort by 301Works (through the Internet Archive) to preserve those “mappings,” how long would it be before bitly ran out of strings? My assumption-dependent answer back then — roughly the year 2030 — is now as irrelevant as 301Works seems to be invisible, but you can find the third post here with backlinks to the first two: “Soooo big!” Counting on bit.ly, Part III.

About four years ago, I discovered an iOS app called iMandalArt that offered a distinctive way to think about goal setting and task accomplishment. It was based on what I subsequently learned is the Lotus Blossom technique, often described as a form of brainstorming or mind mapping.

When I wrote my first blog post about the app, iMandalArt coming to an iPad near you, my perspective was largely shaped by a bunch of popular productivity apps, for example, Things. Let’s call it a seeing-the-world-through-GTD-colored-glasses outlook. I knew that iMandalArt was somehow different, but I confessed that I was pretty sure I didn’t “get it.”

As I was writing yesterday’s post about the “non-recall recall” by Chobani of some of its Greek yogurt, I wondered briefly how this all started. Who actually took the time to explore, research, and investigate this, and then pulled it together for the rest of us? Watching more of the Twitter stream today, there was the answer at 9:17 am from John Sowell, self-described as a public safety reporter at the Idaho Statesman:

John Sowell ‏@IDS_Sowell
Six days after I broke the story that stores removed Chobani yogurt from shelves, the company admits to a recall.